中赞友谊农场是江苏农垦联合中垦集团在境外投资设立的第一个农业项目，而中修农业公司在境外设立农业项目自然也并不是他们吹嘘的所谓改变非洲国家饥饿的现状，提高当地人民生活水平，而是因为国内竞争激烈，可利用土地减少，农产品价格降低，于是便来到了自然条件优越，劳动力价格低廉，粮食价格却高于国内的非洲大地上进行侵略以获取超额利润。 在友谊农场中，四周高墙环绕，存储库房由敞开式改为封闭式，加强对生产资料从采购入库到田间耗用的全过程监控， 实际上就是为了防止当地劳动人民因为饥饿贫穷而来夺取中修农场的粮食。而每年粮食销售时，农场以赊销方式同购买方洽谈，粮食销售价格均比当地市场价高出约15%。更是助长了当地的粮食投机家兴风作浪，又何谈能够改变劳动人民饥饿的现状。 2024年，在极端天气导致水资源匮乏时，友谊农场凭借先进的农业技术，立即新钻6口深水井，依托自走式灌溉系统，及时抗旱保产。 而在全国普遍缺乏灌溉系统的情况下，当地的小农便只能眼见自己的庄稼活活旱死，加剧了饥饿状态。 而农场吹嘘“对于表现优秀的员工，农场不但为他们提供住所，而且将农场边缘的一些零散土地提供给他们免费耕种。”来自中修的各农业公司以极其低廉的价格从赞比亚买办政府手中成百上千公顷地抢夺了大量土地，只把边缘零星土地供给员工耕种，但这片土地本就属于赞比亚劳动人民所有，中修等帝国主义国家对殖民地的野蛮掠夺是造成非洲人民贫困的根本原因，而农场说“90%的农场职工拥有面积约为18亩的家庭种植区，这不光能满足职工家庭一年的粮食需求，还能对外销售解决日常开支。”似乎被雇佣的工人已经进入了人间天堂，但提供耕地不过是进一步压低农业工人工资的手段。而这实际上也是一种半封建剥削——只有接受雇佣而被友谊农场的资本家驱使的农业工人才被允许耕种一小块边角土地，一方面这些农业工人受资本主义剥削，用自己的劳动力换取工资，但是因为中修对殖民地的残酷掠夺，殖民地劳动者的工资往往严重低于劳动力价值，因而另一方面，他们便也受到作为地主的友谊农场的资本家的封建剥削，以出卖自己劳动力为农场劳作的形式而缴纳了劳役地租以换取一块土地耕种。 “中赞友谊农场严格执行当地的用工规定，所有工人工资标准严格按照农场主协会与种植业工人协会每年商定的工资标准执行，并为所有工人上缴养老金以及工伤保险，保证员工的合法权益。”但据2011年的一篇报道显示，"这些标准尽管与农场工会协商过并且获得政府批准，仍低于国家的最低工资水平。"而与友谊农场相仿的另一家“中垦农场的工人每年至少举行一次罢工来要求提高工资。”2008年，中垦农场一些工人拿一小时1020赞比亚克瓦查的工资（2008年7~9月间，1美元约为3500-3700克瓦查）；2024年，针对450亩边角旱地的抗旱、除草任务，农场聘用当地工人及家属进行人工作业，每人日均收入40克瓦查（按当前汇率为10.46元人民币）。实际上可以看出当地被中修农场雇佣的农业工人的工资是相当低的。 赞比亚的可耕地面积占国土面积的58%，多达4320万公顷，但实际耕地面积只占可耕地面积的14%。并且到了2020年，其粮食自给率只有不到75%，仍有198万人面临饥饿状态，2023年赞比亚农业增加值占GDP的比重为2.79%，比2010年下降了6.63个百分点。在帝国主义的残酷剥削下，赞比亚根本没有人力物力去发展农业，只能荒废大量土地，能够开发的土地还要被帝国主义侵占来攫取超额利润。 社会主义中国曾经修建坦赞铁路帮助赞比亚，但是如今的中修说什么要弘扬坦赞铁路精神，借社会主义国家对第三世界国家援助的史实，打着合作共赢的旗号来掩盖中修对赞比亚的无耻掠夺，只有摆脱帝国主义的殖民侵略，赞比亚人民才能真正开发丰富的自然资源，才能摆脱饥贫交加的现状。 http://journal.crnews.net/ncgztxcs/2024/dsqq/znkjsdqzxfj/965558_20240902031210.html https://www.aisixiang.com/data/43487.html 
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You can’t conclude that “agricultural product prices decrease” just from “fierce domestic competition, reduced available land.”
Isn’t developing agriculture in colonies for obtaining cheap agricultural products to supply raw materials for industry, while also harvesting the scissor difference between industrial and agricultural profits from the colonies?
Why is this considered feudal exploitation?
Isn’t this mainly to divide and weaken workers, cultivating a worker-elite?
Why is this considered semi-feudal exploitation?
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I don’t quite understand the residual feudal elements here. How can it be identified?
If the capitalists of Friendship Farm require these land workers to hand over a part of their labor income to the capitalists every year, then it is reasonable to say that feudal exploitation exists.
The decrease in agricultural product prices and the reduction of land are parallel, not causally related.
This farm mainly uses agricultural machinery in Zambia to cultivate with higher labor productivity, selling agricultural products to earn excess profits, and is not input into China.
The term semi-feudal exploitation is used because they do not completely rely on renting land to survive, but also engage in hired labor. Moreover, being able to cultivate these lands is based on their work on the farm, which is essentially paying land rent through labor.
Free cultivation of land also doesn’t lead to high wages because their wages are very low, and cultivating land can only produce some grains. Considering that workers have to work on the farm every day, the time they can spend cultivating their own land is also limited.
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So where is the component of feudal exploitation? Isn’t the cultivation of this land given to them by the capitalists? Another comrade believes that this is a method used by capitalists to suppress workers’ wages, effectively replacing bonuses given to “excellent workers” with this land grant. I think this explanation makes more sense.
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Why does the beginning mention that Zambia’s food prices are higher?
Here is a list of food prices available in stores and small shops in Zambia:
- Regular milk, 1 liter CN¥9.3 (ZMW 36)
- A fresh white bread (500 grams) CN¥6.6 (ZMW 25)
- Eggs (regular) (12 pieces) CN¥13.3 (ZMW 51)
- Local cheese (1 kilogram) CN¥61 (ZMW 236)
- Water (1.5-liter bottle) CN¥4.9 (ZMW 18.7)
- A bottle of wine (mid-range) CN¥42 (ZMW 161)
- Local beer (0.5-liter bottle) CN¥6.2 (ZMW 24)
- Imported beer (0.33-liter bottle) CN¥8.6 (ZMW 33)
- A pack of cigarettes (Marlboro) CN¥16.5 (ZMW 64)
- Chicken breast (boneless, skinless) (1 kilogram) CN¥28 (ZMW 109)
- Apples (1 kilogram) CN¥15.5 (ZMW 60)
- Oranges (1 kilogram) CN¥15 (ZMW 58)
- Potatoes (1 kilogram) CN¥12.3 (ZMW 48)
- Lettuce (1 head) CN¥8 (ZMW 31)
- White rice (1 kilogram) CN¥16.7 (ZMW 64)
- Tomatoes (1 kilogram) CN¥8.9 (ZMW 34)
- Bananas (1 kilogram) CN¥9.9 (ZMW 38)
- Onions (1 kilogram) CN¥10.6 (ZMW 41)
- Beef (1 kilogram) (or similar red meat) CN¥40 (ZMW 155)
- Pears (1 kilogram) CN¥18.6 (ZMW 72)
- Cucumbers (1 kilogram) CN¥4.9 (ZMW 18.9)
- Perrier water (small bottle 0.33 liters) CN¥2.5 (ZMW 9.6)
- Sausages (1 kilogram) CN¥75 (ZMW 288)
- White cheese (1 kilogram) CN¥48 (ZMW 186)
In fact, these should be considered as parallel relationships, but the claim that agricultural product prices are decreasing is incorrect. A more accurate statement is that agricultural capital chooses to go overseas because domestic investment in agriculture yields too low profits and involves too high risks. Investing in domestic agriculture not only requires paying high rent to China’s largest landowners—the bureaucratic monopoly bourgeoisie—but also involves the constant risk of being extorted for additional profits by the bureaucratic monopoly bourgeoisie with various pretexts, or even direct violence, land seizure, and so on. Moreover, the degree of monopoly in China’s agricultural sector is very high; many agricultural departments have long been monopolized by bureaucratic capital like COFCO Group, or at least dominated by various private monopolistic capital within different agricultural sectors. Domestic agricultural capital thus faces direct competition with these behemoths. Finally, investing in domestic agriculture also involves the disparities between workers and peasants, urban and rural areas; agricultural product prices are already suppressed by urban capitalists, making it even harder for agricultural capital to make profits. Under these circumstances, investing in colonies and becoming a local overlord becomes a more advantageous choice for agricultural capitalists. Lenin pointed out that the main reason capital export dominates during the era of imperialism is due to domestic capital surplus—that reasoning is exactly right.
Feudal exploitation manifests as farm workers paying corvée land rent, meaning after working on their own land for a certain period, they must also work on the landlord’s land as part of their feudal obligation to rent the landlord’s land. The phenomenon of farms allocating land to workers, who then cultivate it while also performing unpaid labor on the farm’s land for a fixed period, is the most typical form of feudal exploitation.
Ninety percent of the workers already cultivate land; based solely on this, claiming it’s to cultivate the aristocracy of workers is quite unreasonable. The ratio of officials to common people would be at least 9:1, which is far too exaggerated. Furthermore, this is not just a superficial gesture by the bureaucratic regime, as if it’s a reward for workers. Cultivating land is not a privilege; compared to the grueling labor of farming, it’s just another form of hard labor. The 18 mu of land is only a small patch, yet it must support an entire family. Farm workers must work both for the farm and on their own land, often requiring family members to help with planting due to their busy schedules. Moreover, with such a small landholding, the only feasible mode of production is small-scale, manual labor, with workers bearing the costs of fertilizer, seeds, and tools themselves. The land provided by the farm is usually marginal and fragmented, and its quality is poor—most likely quite infertile. Overall, it’s a gamble with nature; how much can be grown and whether a family can survive depends on luck. There are even additional forms of exploitation and oppression within the farm that are not mentioned. Judging from this, if this is considered a good thing, then serfs renting land from feudal lords lived in paradise compared to this.
In reality, if the idea of “dividing workers and cultivating the aristocracy of workers” were to be truly realized, land would not be genuinely given; instead, the workers would be empowered to detach from labor—just like in past feudal societies, where landlords were granted land along with serfs, and landlords did not need to work their land themselves. They only needed to collect rent from the peasants working the land. Similarly, in capitalist society, landlords do not personally work the land; instead, they let agricultural workers labor for them and enjoy the profits of agricultural management. Isn’t that what’s depicted in Dream of the Red Chamber, where Jia’s family owns multiple estates and waits for stewards like Wu Jinxiao to serve them? If the goal is to cultivate a so-called “aristocracy of workers” or other classes detached from labor, this approach would be more reasonable.
Semi-feudal exploitation exists because it is not purely feudal; it involves both capitalist and feudal exploitation simultaneously, with feudal exploitation not being fully abolished. Capitalist exploitation refers to farm workers receiving wages after laboring on the farm, with the farm directly extracting surplus value. However, as mentioned in the text, these wages are so low that they cannot support the worker’s entire family. The capitalists do not pay the full value of the labor power, failing to meet even the most miserable minimum for workers’ reproduction (to the point where workers are left with empty wallets and awaiting death). If that were the case, capitalist production could not fully operate. To sustain production, the farm must find ways to make workers support themselves, but not by providing land or other physical goods freely; instead, they grant workers a small piece of land in exchange for labor, giving workers the right to cultivate it. This means that, besides performing the necessary, but insufficient, labor for the farm, workers also have to perform additional unpaid labor on the farm’s land. This extra labor becomes the cost of using the farm’s land. Consequently, farm workers are subjected to feudal obligations—they work unpaid for the farm to rent the land. Their labor thus takes on the nature of corvée land rent, subjected to semi-feudal exploitation. In essence, rather than just receiving wages to increase income, workers are renting land and receiving a minimal wage that barely compensates for the income gap of small-scale production.
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This actually makes no sense. It distorts the nature of feudal exploitation directly. The so-called “reward” on the farm is not like giving gifts among friends, which is gratuitous, but is conditional on the farm workers having to work the land for the farm. The statement “farming this part of the land is not a gift from the capitalists” is like saying that exploitation does not exist, and that serfs in feudal society were also “awarded” a portion of land by the manor lords, even if they had to farm this land themselves and pay the price of regularly performing labor on the lord’s land. If this were a reward, it would be akin to standing from the landlord’s perspective, saying that letting tenant farmers rent and farm their land is just the landlord’s kindness, showing “mercy” to wandering tenant farmers begging. This kind of logic essentially denies the historical existence of feudal exploitation.
This statement is half right and half wrong. The correct part is that it is indeed a means for capitalists to suppress workers’ wages, because in this whole matter, the farm can directly give workers a very small amount of wages and some trivial, insignificant land, which costs them very little. But on the other hand, workers generally still rely on highly unstable small-scale production to support themselves, and on top of that, they have to go and farm the land for the farm. If this is the farm’s way of treating “excellent workers,” then it can only be said that the farm is perhaps too good at “buying,” turning all the strikebreakers into serfs.
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I still do not agree that this counts as feudal exploitation. First of all, this is not “unpaid labor,” as the relationship between farm workers and the farm is one of employment, and the farm needs to pay wages when the workers labor there. Moreover, the farm does not impose extralegal coercion on the workers and cannot force them to perform feudal obligations. The article mentions that “by giving them free cultivation of scattered land on the edge of the farm, 90% of the farm workers have a household plot of about 18 acres. The crops planted on this land—corn, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, etc.—not only meet the annual food needs of the workers’ families but can also be sold externally to cover daily expenses,” and it does not charge in-kind rent, monetary rent, or anything similar. It also cannot be considered labor rent; farm workers are not working unpaid on non-reserved land of the farm, and these lands are not used to support the entire family of the workers. The income from these lands is only part of the workers’ wages. The paper cited states that “at least the Chinese farms Zhongzan Friendship, Xiangyang, and Zhongken Farm are members of the Zambia National Farmers’ Union, and they pay wages to workers according to union standards. Although these standards have been negotiated with farm unions and approved by the government, they are still below the national minimum wage.” The reason these farms distribute these fragmented small plots of land to workers for cultivation is also to enable workers to be “self-sufficient,” which effectively means paying wages below the value of labor, and I believe this should be regarded as a means of suppressing wages.
Discussing the issue of paying wages is meaningless because semi-feudal exploitation does not exclude the payment of wages; the characteristic of semi-feudal exploitation is only the collection of part of the surplus labor in the form of land rent.
However, farm workers are indeed subjected to coercive force, and even if it is not super-economic coercion, it is naturally driven by economic pressure.
Corvée land rent refers to the farmers performing surplus labor for the landowner without compensation in exchange for the right to carry out necessary labor on their land. If we talk about the situation described in the text, then this definition undoubtedly fits the description, as has been discussed earlier. To refute this point, one should also provide corresponding arguments as to why this is not considered corvée land rent, rather than simply making a conclusion.
Here, I am confusing the concept of “unpaid labor” that I mentioned. The “unpaid labor” I refer to is the surplus labor performed by workers on the farm beyond cultivating their own land. According to this definition, if the farm pays them wages, the fundamental issue does not change because their labor and the wages they receive are not equal (the farm’s profit is precisely derived from the surplus labor of the workers). Paying wages simply means that what is implemented here is not entirely feudal exploitation but a mixture of hired labor exploitation. Although the farm recognizes that part of the workers’ labor should be compensated equally, it then refuses to acknowledge that the remaining majority of labor should also be equally compensated.
This reflects a misunderstanding of wages. Wages are a category within capitalist production relations; they do not exist under every economic system. Wages are the purchasing power of the worker’s labor value or price, and only when workers are in a capitalist employment relationship does the income paid by capitalists become wages. Here, they are engaged in small-scale production on their own land, and what they earn is income from small-scale production, which by no means counts as wages. The unconditionally viewing all income from labor as wages is, in fact, a mistake made by bourgeois political economists like Adam Smith, who interpret wages with a super-historical perspective.
What is confusing is that this sentence itself is a pure contradiction. If the workers are completely proletarian, where do they get the means of production like land? Wouldn’t they become “property-owning” proletarians? If fully-fledged workers can “be self-sufficient,” why do they still need to rely on wages to make a living? Isn’t this self-contradictory? If the proletariat is not already impoverished to the point of having nothing and having to sell their labor to survive, then they cannot be called “proletariat” anymore.
While the “feeling” here is correct, it does not explain the issue. It is not contradictory to what I said about “semi-feudal exploitation.” The reason why the farm implements “semi-feudal exploitation” is precisely because it uses this method to suppress wages! As mentioned above, this way, the farm can greatly reduce the wages it needs to pay and only use a minimal amount of wages and a small piece of land to get rid of workers, forcing the workers to bear the risks brought by small-scale production and natural disasters.
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I think what you said still makes sense.
I’m not very sure; judging whether there are feudal remnants isn’t just about whether land has been allocated to them for farming. If it involves feudal exploitation, then where do these personal dependencies and super-economic coercion manifest? In cases of personal dependency, these workers should have no personal freedom, just like the bonded laborers in old China.
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The first point is that judging whether it is feudal exploitation is precisely done through the mode of production. The core of feudal mode of production is maintained through the feudal obligation of land rent collection by landlords from peasants. The small-scale production of peasants is the foundation for maintaining the feudal mode of production. Personal dependence and super-economic coercion are all necessary means to ensure the continuation of feudal exploitation. Moreover, regarding super-economic coercion, it is already “super-economic” and has little direct relation to the feudal economy; it is already a matter of political category. Just like landlords arresting runaway peasants and forcibly binding peasants to the land, this is not an economic matter but the landlord using the power of the state to maintain feudal relations of production, forcing peasants to be exploited by landlords, which is a political reaction against the economy.
And personal dependence and super-economic coercion are not necessarily required. If, without using super-economic coercion or forcing peasants into personal dependence on landlords, peasants are still compelled to fulfill feudal obligations and pay feudal rent to landlords, it is still a form of feudal exploitation. Under semi-feudal exploitation, this becomes the use of capitalist economic coercion to force peasants to fulfill feudal obligations. As stated in this article, peasants paying labor rent to landlords is not achieved through super-economic coercion but through capitalist economic coercion, such as hunger discipline: if workers do not serve the company, land will be reclaimed; they will lose their jobs, and their entire family will starve. To survive, they can only rent land from the company to sustain themselves while serving the company and receiving a meager wage.
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